Italo

Kambui Olujimi’s North Star series features paintings, drawings, and video of weightless, floating Black bodies “freed from the gravity of oppression,” as the artist puts it. Olujimi pictures a future in which a politics of resistance can result in true bodily freedom. The artist is interested in representing Black joy or Black rhapsody as a counternarrative to the constant circulation of imagery of Black suffering and death. All of the figures in his paintings have variegated skin tones and ambiguous genders, highlighting their occupation of a transitional space and our perception of them as futuristic, otherworldly beings.